Word: gallipoli
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...time, and the living bear no responsibility for it. This is Prime Minister Howard's view too, although--significantly enough--he is quick to drape himself in the nobler emblems of Australian history with which his generation had nothing to do, such as the heroism of the soldiers at Gallipoli...
...Punjab Infantry Battalion-the oldest, most decorated and, according to them, the most admired unit in the Indian army. Founded in 1705 by the Mahraja of Patiala, they earned their stripes fighting wherever the British Empire needed them, including the Middle East. During World War I, they fought in Gallipoli, Sinai, Gaza, and Jerusalem, and formed a major part of the British force occupying Iraq during the 1920s. Since India's independence from Britain, they have seen action in their country's grim conflicts with Pakistan. Their last mission was counter-insurgency against Islamic militants in Kashmir...
...Carlyon has spent eight years erecting his own monument to those half-forgotten men. He started with Gallipoli (2001), about the doomed campaign that launched the Anzac legend. Now, in The Great War (Macmillan; 860 pages), he looks at the Australians on the western front, the 750-km line of trenches that snaked through France and Belgium. In the national memory of the war, Gallipoli is the big event. Places like Fromelles, Bullecourt, Mont Saint Quentin are "hardly spoken of," Carlyon writes. Yet they should be bywords for valor?and tragedy. Most of the 324,000 volunteers who sailed...
...wrote about than with his friends. "Reading their letters, you get to know them," he says, "and in a funny way it makes you very sad when you find out they're going to die." He was especially fond of Philip Schuler, a handsome, talented journalist who went to Gallipoli as a war correspondent, then enlisted in the Army and was sent to France. Writing home from Messines, he signed off: "Keep on remembering." Four days later, he was killed. "There were so many like him that we lost," Carlyon says. They belong to "a lost world, a world where...
...racetrack used to be Carlyon's beat, but a visit to Gallipoli in 1998 left him "completely besotted with the place. I wanted to know more and more." For a writer, war offers an incomparable canvas, he says: "It's life and death. Everything's there." The titanic scale of the First World War and its domination by machines?artillery, bombs, tanks, planes, machine guns?only underscored the humanity of the combatants. For Carlyon the war was "the biggest tragedy in our history." But those who took part did "astonishing things," he writes?like the capture of the heavily defended...